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Certified Professional Installation

Security Camera Installation is backed by a brand trusted by organizations like the United States Department of the Treasury, General Motors and NASA. With an unheard of 3 year warranty and 100% free support that never expires.

We're extremely happy to help you set up your system and troubleshoot any issues. Our support hours are from 9AM-7PM Monday - Friday (EST) and we are available via chat, email, phones, and remote PC screen-sharing. You can reach us at 866-414-2553.

Exposing the Surveillance Industry Shortchange

The Top 13 ways that sneaky marketing execs in the surveillance industry get you to throw your money away and get nothing for it.

1. Selling Security Cameras that have been compromised by Viruses and Botnets

Many Security Cameras are being used by Hostile Foreign Actors to Attack ISPs, Nuclear Power Plants, and Military Networks

Many low quality brands (and even some big name ones) are being shipped with compromised code and backdoor accounts.

This support guide talks about what's happening, how we try to prevent it by creating a network within a network to hide SCW cameras from hackers, how you can prevent it by changing the default password as soon as you get the device, and other best practices.

2. Trademarking snappy sounding nonsense.

One of the biggest new ploys in late 2017 is for a company to trademarking a snappy name for a feature that nearly every camera has. Since it isn't legal for other brands to use that trademarked text on their products, it sounds like they don't have that feature. in reality, most cameras really do.

"Color Night Vision"™ is a Trademark not a Technology

Nearly every professional IP camera has a setting to force color mode at night and disable infrared night vision, but that doesn't mean you should use it.

"Spectrum Vision True WDR" is a snappy name for a mystery spec

For decades, higher end cameras have included WDR. WDR takes a low light optimized and a high light optimized image setting and stitches the two photos into one image to prevent shadows from being too dark. The industry standard way of describing WDR is to state whether it is digital or optical (with optical WDR being better since optical WDR also still has digital WDR). The industry standard way is to describe the WDR spec is to state the db that the optical WDR uses, with higher db ratings being better. Rather than report any of these stats, all we have here is a marketing term.

"True HDR" is a cynical, intentionally misleading phrase

Digital WDR has sometimes been called HDR which can be confusing. Savvy consumers could tell the difference between DWDR or HDR from "True" Optical WDR because the word "true" was used to differentiate DWDR/HDR (digital) from Optical WDR (which is better). Now one company is saying that they have "True HDR," which is incredibly misleading.

3. Cheap camera components that don't deliver true 1080P.

Cameras with cheap processors that use old compression

We often get asked why our cameras look so much better than other brands - even when both are 1080P.

The difference is that many cheap cameras lack the processing power and don't want to pay the license fees for modern file compression. Old compression and slow processors makes video look blocky and have what are called "artifacts" which look like multi-colored pixelated "edges."

4. Cheap no-name knock-off processors in the NVR.

NVRs with low bitrates

This shortchange is extremely pervasive. Many companies that sell NVRs hide the most important technical spec in their NVRs: the incoming bitrate of the processor. Incoming bitrate is the amount of video data that can be processed per second. Low bitrate NVRs can only record in 1080P when you connect a few cameras, when you connect all the cameras, you have to lower the resolution.

A "1080P" unit that can only record at 720P when all the cameras are connect is recording less than half the resolution it promised.

No consumer would be ok with ordering a 1080P TV and getting a 720P installed sideways at half the frames per second.

6. Marketing claims using "New Math"

0.89% more is NOT "double the resolution"

Some companies make absolutely terrible, mathematically-impossible, marketing claims that are 100% opposite the facts. There's many different versions of this same "shortchange," but in this one , we highlight how an unnamed billion dollar company is trying to assert that 2K (in green) on the left is twice the quality of 1080P (in red).

7. People still Aggressively Selling Analog, while Desperately Trying to Make it Sound Like it's Not Analog

It's 2015. You should be done with analog. Retailers, it's ok to keep some in stock to help people with legacy systems, but it's time to stop marketing bunny-ears TV quality cameras like they solve someone's security threats.

But, it has "1000 TVL!"

TVL or television lines is usually a term reserved for an analog camera's resolution. A 1000 TVL camera has a better lens than a 700TVL camera, that's true. The problem with 1000 TVL is that an analog DVR can't record any higher than 976 x 582 resolution. That's a little around 700 TVL. 1000 TVL sounds like "better than 720 TVL," but it will produce the exact same recording.

9. Every camera is a "license plate" camera!

The term "License plate cameras" is used rather flippantly by the security camera industry.

At SCW, we try not to use the misleading term "License Plate Camera." The term just doesn't mean anything in particular and sounds a lot like "License Plate Recognition" which is a software feature that you pay monthly for from a VMS.

Is CCTV-Reviews.com #fakenews reviews?

CCTV-Reviews.com has a lot of negative reviews about a slew of security camera retailers, but suspiciously has nothing by glowing praise for only one company. The CEO of that company just happens to own the CCTV-Reviews.com domain.

12. Calling a POE NVR a "HD Video Appliance" and Then Charging Double for It

This shortchange mostly goes after enterprise clients.

The companies using these "video appliance" names want to charge these larger clients more money for their products, but they don't want people comparing features with other providers, so they ignore industry standards and norms and come up with their own lingo.